What's That Pig Outdoors? Page 4

  Even though I couldn’t speak, I still had a child’s knack for making friends easily. Some of those friends quickly joined our little “classes”—as many as eight or ten at a time. For them it was like a preschool, and they were enthralled by the preparation and presentation of the charts of my outings. As I learned to read, so did they. Big Bird would have been proud.

  This experience of learning along with hearing children was an early form of “mainstreaming”—the philosophy, still controversial today, of educating deaf children as much as possible with hearing classmates of the same age. Its immediate result was that though I might be deaf, for a remarkably long time I never felt “different” from my peers. I didn’t know any better, and neither did they.

  At some point a few months after Mother and Dad had begun the Mirrielees lessons, I experienced an epiphany. Though I had stopped talking, the concept of speech had never quite left my subconscious, and as I learned to read from the charts, somehow I made the connection between printed and spoken language. Dad remembers that the breakthrough was a jubilant moment very much like the occasion when Helen Keller exultantly learned her first word—“water”—as Annie Sullivan pumped it over her hands. It would make a better story if I or my parents could recall the exact word I spoke, but I’m afraid we’ve all forgotten.

  Whatever it was, it loosed the floodgates of language. As speech returned to me, with it came the knack for lipreading. In fact, I thought everybody read lips. When I talked to people, I’d grasp their faces and turn them toward me so that they could see mine. Evidently I assumed everyone was deaf like me. Eventually I did learn that they weren’t, but by then I’d decided, with all the off-center wisdom of a small child, that deafness was a minor, if interesting, human characteristic, like freckles, blond hair, double-jointedness, or the ability to teeter along the top of a board fence.

  Each morning for two hours, sometimes more, I’d sit at a little table and assemble sentences, mimicking the charts. Little by little my reading vocabulary grew. And after that first breakthrough, so did my speech. Some sounds were easy, others more difficult. The consonant “m,” for instance, was a snap. Mother would press her lips together, flare her nostrils, and, engage her larynx—mmmmmmmmmmm—while holding my little hand first to her throat so that I could feel the vibrations there, then to her nose for the same reason. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Easy. Mustn’t let too much air out the nose, though. Hold back a little. There. You’ve got it, Hank! Ooh!

  Oooooooooooo. A little harder but not too much. It’s easy enough to pooch out the lips and switch on the voice box, but that’s only the half of it. Ohhhhhhhooo. Too much like a low rumble in the back of the throat. The vibrations of the larynx need to be focused in the front part of the mouth, with the help of the tongue as well as the lips. Ooooooooo. See, Hank? Feel it right here, on both sides of your mouth? That’s it!

  To this day, however, the sibilant “s” gives me fits. Producing it properly requires the tongue to be placed just so, behind and perhaps a little lower than the juncture of upper and lower teeth. The tongue must be shaped and tensed in a certain fashion, too, and the difference between the right way and the wrong way is very small. How does a teacher get all this across to a four-year-old who hasn’t the slightest idea of the anatomic structure of the maxillary cavity? Not easily. Thsthsthsthsth. Nonononono, says Mother, with a slight shake of the head. Try again. Sthssthssthssth. That’s better. C’mon, once more. Ssssthsssssss. A huge smile. Good enough for government work.

  Mother had to be my jailer as well as teacher. Four-and five-year-olds have the attention spans of shrews; ten minutes after beginning a two-hour session, I’d demand to be let out to play with my friends, who with normal childhood capriciousness sometimes tired quickly of our “play school.” Some days degenerated into a two-hour contest of wills. I was adamant, but Mother was immovable. Until every last lesson of the day had been learned, she wouldn’t release me from battleground to playground.

  During these go-rounds I learned a trick that infuriated my parents. When I’d been naughty and Mother or Dad was laying down the law, I’d shut my eyes tight so I wouldn’t “hear” the scolding. If I couldn’t see it, I must have reasoned, it wasn’t happening. Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is around? It certainly does, and I quickly learned why in the form of a sharp thwack across the seat of the pants. A few more swats cured me of the habit. Just the same, lipreading a chiding is much harder than it sounds. Can you look someone in the eye while he gives you hell?

  On October 9, 1944, the Randolph was commissioned, and Dad went to sea. While the carrier steamed to the Caribbean on its shakedown cruise, Buck, Mother, and I drove to Ho-Ho-Kus for the duration. It was not a good time for Mother. She resented Dad’s volunteering for sea duty and leaving her with all the responsibility for my training. Worse, all the way up to Ho-Ho-Kus I cried and screamed, as four-year-olds will on long auto trips, while my brother gasped between attacks of asthma. Fortunately, Mother recalls, the old Ford we owned had only one door that would open—the driver’s—and she didn’t have to worry about one of us tumbling out onto the highway. A trooper stopped her for speeding, but when Buck informed him at the top of his voice, “My dad has gone to sea!” she was let off with a warning.

  Before the Randolph sailed to join the Pacific fleet, Dad came home to Ho-Ho-Kus on a brief leave. There he spent hours teaching me to ride a bicycle, a process that, because of my damaged sense of balance, took a long time and was more nerve-racking than the usual bumps, scrapes, and bruises of a normal childhood. As I’ve said, so long as I had a definite horizon to focus upon, I could walk normally. Pumping pedals, keeping handlebars straight, and staying upright, however, was an infinitely more complex undertaking. But I learned. Soon I was riding on the sidewalk, then in the street. As I wobbled out into traffic with my playmates, Mother’s and Dad’s hearts welled up into their throats.

  Miss Mirrielees had urged them to allow me to live as independent and normal a life as possible, and they stuck to this wisdom, though other parents would phone them to announce indignantly, “I almost hit Hank with my car this morning!” It was Dad’s belief that they hadn’t come within a country mile of doing so but just wanted to express their outrage that a handicapped child wasn’t being sheltered from life’s everyday perils. (To this day “Caution Deaf Child” traffic signs make me wince. The parents who demand them on their streets mean well, but I can’t help wondering what sort of self-image, let alone self-reliance, such signs create in the youngsters they are intended to protect.)

  In Ho-Ho-Kus, Mother continued to labor with me, using Miss Mirrielees’ methods—not just Chart Work but the conventional speech and lipreading drills she advocated after the groundwork had been laid. “Bee, even, Jean, whee, mean, green,” I’d say, attempting to sharpen the long “e” sound into one that would please Mother. Our task no longer was one of crude shaping but more delicate polishing. By early 1945 my speech had become quite intelligible, though nobody would mistake my breathy monotone and foggy articulation for the voice and speech of a normal hearing child. And I had a gift for lipreading. So long as my interlocutor faced me, I could communicate with almost anyone who dealt with children of my age.

  My world broadened. Before becoming deaf I had understood, even as a toddler, that the country where I lived was fighting a faraway place called Japan, where people looked different from us. And I had understood that Dad wore a blue uniform because he was helping fight the yellow-skinned, squinty-eyed, buck-toothed caricatures I saw in propaganda posters everywhere on Navy bases. Otherwise I was in a soundless limbo about the rest of the world. Only after I had acquired enough language to uncover the facts through lipreading and print did I learn about Hitler and the Nazis. One of my earliest and most vivid memories is of a sunny spring day in 1945. While playing in a horse trough on my grandparents’ farm in Pennsylvania, I looked up to see Mother dashing down the hill from the farmhouse, tears of joy streaming down her face. “The G
ermans are finished!” she cried. “The Germans are finished!” I was rooted to the spot, for even as a four-and-a-half-year-old I knew exactly what Mother’s words meant: the fighting in the Pacific would be over soon, too, and Dad would come home.

  That fall, Mother drove me to the local public school in Ho-Ho-Kus to enroll me in kindergarten. I was eager to join my hearing playmates, but would the teachers accept me? I knew and cared nothing about such matters as I dashed gaily into the large kindergarten room. Two of my friends, off in a corner, beckoned me over to help them build a house of blocks.

  Earlier, Mother had taken me to meet the principal. I had an advantage, Mother recalls, in that the principal and his teachers knew little or nothing about the deaf. In that small public school there was no teacher of the deaf; indeed, there were no other deaf pupils in the community. “Nobody had any preconceived ideas what deaf children could do or could not do,” Mother says. “We all expected you to do almost everything.”

  My being able to read his lips and talk with him was important enough, but what evidently persuaded the principal to take a risk on an unknown deaf child was my ability to read. Today, thanks to Sesame Street and parental ambition, reading is a commonplace achievement tor preschoolers. But in the 1940s it was still a rare accomplishment. I was reading far ahead of my age group, so much so that Mother thinks I was better known in the community as the five-year-old who could read than as the town’s only deaf child. The principal, visibly impressed, told Mother that though the school had never had a deaf pupil, he was most willing to give me a try on a year-by-year basis. There was no argument from the teachers either, for the same reason.

  The Mirrielees Method had done its work well. Not only had it enabled me to catch up to my contemporaries in the ability to use language, it even had given me a head start.

  Just once, when l was six or seven years old, did I stand in Miss Mirrielees’ presence. Little memory remains of the brief encounter: just a foggy image of a tall, thin, benevolent wraith in bobby sox and white tennis shoes, the whole topped with a bun of gray hair. She had been traveling, and had stopped in at our home in Ho-Ho-Kus to see how her pupil-once-removed was faring.

  I was not the only deaf child who benefited from the Mirrielees Method. As far as I have been able to determine, her teachings set more than a score of deaf children on the road to successful and fulfilling lives among the hearing. Why, you may ask, was the Mirrielees Method not widely accepted by the deaf educational establishment of the time? The answer is complex. For one thing, she dealt in heresies. She promoted the renegade notion that parents could teach their deaf children not only to read but also to speak and read lips. Moreover, she was far ahead of her time in contending that very young children could learn to read. (Only recently have researchers confirmed that infants as young as fourteen months of age can indeed distinguish among shapes of letters and words and understand their meaning.) Perhaps worst of all, she possessed few professional credentials. She had earned no college degree and offered no mountains of research data to support her contentions. All she could muster was anecdotal evidence about the successful lives of a few deaf children.

  In her memoir (in which she refers to herself as “the Teacher”), she tells how “the grandmother of a youngster whose mother had been a correspondence pupil of the Teacher took the child to visit the [Bell Association] headquarters’ offices [in Washington, D.C.]. The child already, following his pre-school home training, had been successfully entered in public school. Much admiration was expressed by the incumbents of the Authorities’ office for the child’s accomplishments. Then came the inevitable question, ‘And where did he go to school?’ When the answer disclosed that his mother had been his pre-school teacher with the help of the Teacher’s correspondence course, the interview was ended on a strong note of disapproval.”

  Most likely I was that child. My maternal grandmother, who supported Mother wholeheartedly in her use of the Mirrielees Method, lived in Washington, and I often stayed with her and my grandfather in the summers. I dimly recall having visited the Bell headquarters with my grandmother, though of course I would have been unaware of any disapproval. Nonetheless, many years later in the 1970s when I was a successful journalist, I got a taste of it. In Washington on business, I dropped by the Bell Association and met its president. When he asked how I had been taught speech and lipreading, my answer brought forth an expression of surprise, consternation, and skepticism.

  “But you are adventitiously deaf,” he said. “That must have made all the difference.”

  Possibly having learned language before becoming deaf did mean a great deal to my later success with speech and lipreading. But I have no residual hearing, another factor frequently cited as being largely responsible for whatever oral success a deaf child might have. Neither, for the most part, do most of the former Mirrielees Method graduates I have been able to locate in recent years. There was, we are all certain, considerable merit to Miss Mirrielees’ theories.

  In the course of researching this book I not only met Ann Percy, the daughter of the novelist Walker Percy and herself a Louisiana State University graduate and successful bookstore proprietor, but also corresponded with Lamar Cason, a former Mirrielees pupil who is currently a chemist in Tennessee. He married Helen Estus, yet another successful Mirrielees product. The Casons are both deaf, as is Ann Percy, and they give much credit to the Mirrielees Method for the successful rearing of their own deaf children. While Ann has remained a champion of oralism, however, the Casons long ago added sign language to their repertoire. Sign was a method of communication of which Miss Mirrielees, who was in many ways a product of her oralist times, disapproved highly.

  Yet the teaching of sign and the Mirrielees Method have a great deal in common. Though their vehicles could not be more different, their aims are nonetheless identical: to give deaf children the priceless diamond of language at the earliest possible moment. I can’t speak for others, but I believe that the Mirrielees Method not only gave me a good chance at a normal life among the hearing but also laid the groundwork for my profession as a journalist. It gave me a deep love of language for its own sake.

  Perhaps a researcher someday will discover a set of Miss Mirrielees’ dusty old mimeographed manuals, study their ideas, and put them to the test in a rigorous academic setting—the test she always sought but never could obtain for her work. It’s hard to dispute the idea that American Sign Language most likely is the quicker and easier way to communicate for those born deaf or those who are deafened before acquiring language. But those who advocate “signed English” over the more “natural” American Sign Language might find a valuable adjunct to their philosophy in the Mirrielees Method.

  And for certain fortunate children—luckier in their home situation and perhaps in their native intelligence than others—the learning of printed and spoken English as their first natural language might give them an important advantage: an early mastery of the primary tongue of the hearing world.

  4

  From ages five to thirteen—that lovely, unhurried span between innocence and adolescence when time and growth almost stand still—my life was for the most part no different from that of an ordinary American youngster. So little happened in my childhood that did not also occur in those of my hearing contemporaries that, to all intents and purposes, I was just another kid on the block. That was my impression then and it is my impression now.

  As I remember it, my childhood was the kind of American sentimentality Norman Rockwell painted in The Saturday Evening Post: idylls of dogs and barbershops, skinned knees and bloody noses, baseball in the spring and football in the fall, Thanksgivings with turkey and Christmases with ham. I made friends and skylarked and fought with them. One day we swore blood oaths of mutual support and the next declared our perpetual enmity. The following week, of course, the grand alliances were restored.

  One hot summer day, in classic six-year-old entrepreneurial fashion a friend and I set up a lemonade stand
on the parkway in front of my house and did a modest business with the few passersby. Suddenly more customers than we could handle dropped in on us in the form of the entire local volunteer fire department, returning from a brush blaze nearby. The mayor was also the fire chief, and after he and his men drained our few jugs, he munificently pressed a five-dollar bill into my hand—more money than I had ever seen in my life.

  That winter I scared the bejesus out of Mother and Dad when, sledding down the long steep hill that ran by our house, I somehow flipped over in a rut and zoomed upside down into the curb behind a parked car, my Flexible Flyer emerging riderless from under the front bumper just like a Laurel and Hardy movie gag. Dad immediately took me to the family physician, Dr. Tomkins, a tall, graying, mustachioed general practitioner who strikingly resembled Boris Karloff and carried himself with the same solemn, almost funereal gravity. The doctor assayed the damage, pronounced it a mild concussion, and told me from now on to watch where I was going. Later on Dr. Tomkins would not only lance an abscess in my ear but also yank my tonsils and adenoids, a common if wholly unnecessary procedure that ought to have cemented the solidarity of the entire generation who had to suffer it. He had thought the surgery might improve my hearing, but his efforts were to no avail.

  And, as do seven-year-olds everywhere, I fell in love with my secondgrade teacher, mooning dreamily over her lush, dimpled blondness every time she passed my desk, my heart leaping when she tousled my hair. She was a ringer for Jane Powell, a dewy-eyed film star of the 1940s. I was very put out that summer vacation arrived and school was out before she realized that she, too, was crazy about me.